TUTORIALS

I have created these tutorials with a view to assist any budding artists who need some help in carrying out workflows with the software that I use.

Whilst these tutorials cover techniques I use in my personal workflow, there may be other procedures to reach the same results.I am not stating that this is the correct way of doing it. This is how I do it and it works for me.

These tutorials assume you have some knowledge of the software involved.

CUSTOM BRUSHES IN PHOTOSHOP

You will benefit more whilst using brushes in Photoshop if you own a tablet. Before creating your own Custom Brush, ensure you get the most out of your tablet by running the tablet drivers and adjusting the settings that best suit your personal preference.

The advantages of a custom brush increase you productivity speed. For example if you wanted to include some grass into your work, rather than drawing blade by blade, a custom brush will allow you to draw clumps of grass. However if you adjust the correct Brush Presets you will be able to draw a field of grass with just a few strokes.

CREATE YOUR OWN MATERIAL FOR ZBRUSH

In ZBrush Materials are taken from the light source reflecting onto a sphere. This includes back light and bounce light. You can create your own Materials, however they can only be loaded as MatCap Materials, which means that you won't be able to adjust the light source within ZBrush.

DECIMATION MASTER AND POLYGROUPS

Decimation Master is a really useful plugin, which can be found at Pixologic.com/Support/Download Center/ZBrush plugins. It can massively reduce the polycount of your model.This is particularly useful for finalising your work and preventing your system from slowing down or at worst crashing.The most useful situation for using Decimation Master would be if you had multiple SubTools which you need to 'Merge Visible' or 'Merge Down'.Details like Texture and 'Transpose' should be carried out before Decimation. It is possible to PolyPaint successfully on a Decimated model. Decimation also disables the option to adjust the Sub Division levels you may have created previously. Therefore Decimation Master should be left until the end of a project.

There will be occaisions where a SubTool will have separate polgroups. If you want to keep those PolyGroups follow this procedure.